The politics of methodological reality practices of everyday life

This article develops an analytic of ontopolitical apparatuses through an ethnomethodologically informed study of the methodological reality practices that constitute everyday existence. Building on John Law's call for methodological interference in “reality-making practices,” we foreground how being is stabilized not by foundational ontologies but by professional and mundane ontography—the performative inscriptions through which worlds are enacted and made accountable. Drawing on Dorothy Smith's sociology of extralocal relations of ruling and Karen Barad's agential realism, we argue that texts, practices, and materialities are not representational but discursive-material doings that reproduce the One-World World. Automobility serves as an exemplary technoscientific ontopolitical apparatus: a hegemonic formation that organizes subjects and objects into an ontocratic order, administering being through infrastructures and mundane reasoning—the infratextures of automobility. Its violence, routinely eventified as “accidents,” exemplifies the reflexive repair work through which disjunctures are normalized. We conclude by considering how alternative practices might interfere with ontographic forgetting and enable counter-ontopolitics.